How Internet Fax Technology Works

In the business world, time is money, and money is money. That's why e-faxing — the practice of using e-mail or other Internet-based services to send faxes — should appeal to you. The speed of e-mail, coupled with the lower cost of sending a broadcast e-mail versus making a lot of phone calls, is

Sending faxes over the Internet might sound like a great idea, but there's one big problem. Very few fax machines know how to "speak" Internet protocols. While some new fax machines can hook directly to the Internet and speak to other Web-enabled fax machines, these new systems will take years to gain widespread acceptance. In the meantime, there are a number of services that bridge the gap between traditional faxes and the new world of Internet-based communications.

A number of companies, such as eFax.com and GreenFax.com, allow you to send or receive faxes over the Internet, either for free or for a monthly fee. Many of these services, however, are limited in what they can do; some require people to dial a long distance number to send you a fax, and others attach their own advertising to your outgoing faxes to cover the cost of the service.

But a handful of fax services use the Internet to mimic real fax machines — that is, they deliver your fax to a recipient's fax machine, anywhere in the world, just as if you had dialed it yourself. Most of these services charge anywhere from 20 cents to 35 cents a page. That's more than you'll pay to send a fax across town, but it's much less than you would pay to dial an overseas phone number, even for a short fax.

These high-end e-fax services could require both software and hardware components:

Software

Commercial e-fax software allows you to send faxes from standard office applications such as Microsoft Word. Instead of dialing another fax machine, however, you use your Internet connection to send a document to a network-based server. Once the fax reaches the server, it's routed across the Internet to the local phone number of your recipient's fax machine. In other words, the e-fax service uses the Internet to handle your fax as two local phone calls, eliminating long distance charges and saving you money.

Most major e-fax vendors offer additional features, including broadcast faxes, the ability to route incoming faxes to you as e-mail attachments, and monthly billing.

Hardware

Most e-fax services don't require you to buy any additional hardware. But if your business needs special services, such as the ability to fax thousands of recipients and to merge outgoing faxes with phone numbers from a database, you might still need to invest in server software that requires dedicated computers.

If you're using faxes as direct-marketing tools, you'll need to avoid alienating potential customers. Most higher-end fax applications are set up to handle database merges with relative ease, which makes them especially attractive to businesses with large fax lists to manage.

In the next few years as more fax machines include built-in Internet connectivity, faxing might give e-mail a run for its money as a cheap, convenient way to send documents. Until that time, however, e-fax services will provide the best alternative to picking up the phone and sending faxes the old-fashioned way.